Women’s Rights and the Japanese State, 1880–1925

1. Women’s Rights as Proletarian Rights: Yamakawa Kikue, Suffrage, and the “Dawn of Liberation”

“…Or as she has put it, "the possibility of feminist support for heinous state policies was always embedded in the liberatory rhetoric of full civil rights." 26 Such analyses of women's complicity with the wartime state and willingness to embrace its goals have helped us better understand the nature of the women's suffrage movement and women's reform movements in the years before military mobilization. While people like Ichikawa never abandoned their hope for full women's suffrage, the creation by the state of nationalist women's organizations, cooperative associations, and increased protections for women during wartime gave many women's rights activists enough of a sense of full subjecthood within the imperial state that they were willing to defer other goals for the duration of the national crisis.…”

Enlightenment Geisha: The Sex Trade, Education, and Feminine Ideals in Early Meiji Japan

“…Studies of the "good wife, wise mother" ideal, too, address the state as a central actor that disseminated its ideology through public schools and official publications (Molony 2005;Nolte and Hastings 1991;Uno 2005). It also raises the possibility of reassessing some of the social transformations ordinarily attributed to the efforts of the Meiji state.…”